Advent and Christmas Poems
I am compiling a list of seasonal poems. Prof. Brownlow has made a wonderful suggestion of Robert Southwell. We can also do some poems about Winter.
I am compiling a list of seasonal poems. Prof. Brownlow has made a wonderful suggestion of Robert Southwell. We can also do some poems about Winter.
It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
This was the first of a number of “sermons,” a play on Horace’s term (sermones) for his satires plus an implied rebuke to the poet’s tendency to preach.
Richard Savage, whose birthday falls in January, was a close friend of Johnson who celebrated his unfortunate life and death in prison from liver failure. This passage is from a longer satire “The Authors.” Note how brutally relevant are down to the last detail, e.g., the stupid press’s attack on inoculation and their cruelty toward the unfortunate.
He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould
A great hymn by Charles Wesley, an Anglican minister who never abandoned the church in which he had been ordained.
Behold, the Bridegroom cometh: go ye out
With lighted lamps and garlands round about
To meet Him in a rapture with a shout.